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Chickens are becoming increasingly popular pets. Follow these tips from the Village Vets, Ant and James, to keep them healthy.

Chickens make fantastic pets with some very interesting behaviours and they also have the added advantage of providing you with eggs to eat.

We often see chickens in our practice, things that we commonly see them for are external parasites like mites and lice. Often these parasites come from native birds or feral birds like Indian mynas. It's really important that you have a chicken coop that is bird proof so that they can't get in, and spread diseases amongst your domestic flock.

These guys are very tough creatures, and they don't show any clinical symptoms of illness until they're very ill. This is an adaption from when they were in the wild where these guys were a prey animal - so if they look sick they're more likely to be preyed upon by other animals, so they tough it out.

So if you have one of these guys and they're not quite right, it's important to seek veterinary attention for them.

If you can bring them in in the cage that they're in, don't clean the cage up for the sake of the vet. We need to see what the animal's passing, we need to see what they're doing in their normal environment, so bring them in in their cage and let us see what they're up to.